Universal Paperclips

This is a very fun game based on the Paperclip Maximiser concept. If you like that sort of thing…

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

It’s based on the Nick Bostrom thought experiment to terrify yourself about AI. So briefly the story is that humans design an AI to make paperclips as efficiently as possible, but accidentally make it a bit too powerful and with no other guidelines.

how come monkeys don’t turn into people anymore?

In this scenario, as well as working out how to make paperclips better, the AI begins to increase it’s own power, and this feeds into it making more paperclips and trying to acquire resources and so on. This escalates and escalates to the point where the AI has upgraded itself so it is this Godlike intelligence controlling and manipulating the humans, but still with the only reason to exist being to make paperclips.

When the AI has turned everything on earth into paperclips it works out a way to go into space and keeps growing and growing, eventually turning the entire universe into a load of paperclips.

Well that’s just great.

it was you Fredo

Of course, Bostrom wrote a whole book about this idea, but to sum it up briefly, it’s a nice way to terrify yourself about the fact that although AI is mostly still just crap and annoying, it is this thing that is going to overtake us at some point. The idea of The Singularity is crazy. Once we invent an AI smarter than us, it can invent an AI smarter than it, and then that can invent an AI smarter, and so on, and all bets are off.

It also makes you think about how dumb everything is. Of course it won’t be paperclips, that’s a thing chosen to be innocuous, and he was probably just looking around his desk and saw a bunch of paperclips to come up with the idea. But we do spend enormous resources on the biggest bunch of crap. Dude

Anyway. Sorry my writing hasn’t been regular. You can guess why


Comments

4 responses to “Universal Paperclips”

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  2. You are absolutely right.

  3. And variants are possible still?

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